Over the last few years, I’ve encountered a number of books in all genres, fiction and non-fiction, that seem quite disengaged from their presumed readership. This appears to have coincided with an uptick in online “literary communities” where writers only talk to and write for each other. There have been several conversations lately, on social media and in actual publications, about the State of Publishing, accompanied by a lot of hand-wringing about How Bad Things Are.